ACORN SPECIAL REPORT:ACORN’s sweet billion-dollar reward
By: Barbara Hollingsworth, Local Opinion Editor
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February 11, 2009
Activists with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), who have spent two decades agitating to force banks to underwrite high-risk loans, are among those most responsible for the sub-prime mortgage debacle underlying the current economic crisis.
But this is Washington, and the more you mess things up, the bigger your reward. And ACORN has also spent hundreds of millions of public and private dollars registering voters and mobilizing support for Democrats.
ACORN’s pay-off is inclusion in the $1 trillion economic stimulus bill sailing through Congress this week with President Barack Obama’s active support.
The House version of the measure gives ACORN access to a $4.19 billion pot of money to “stabilize” the same neighborhoods its previous bank intimidation tactics helped to undermine. Similar provisions are contained in the Senate version.
The money, authorized by the 2008 Housing and Economic Recovery Act, is supposed to go only to state and local governments to help them weather the tide of foreclosures that have forced tens of thousands of families out of their homes, decimating tax rolls and depressing local housing markets.
House Republicans, led by Majority Leader John Boehner, are questioning why the largest radical group in the country – which already has an annual budget of $37.5 million - is on the stimulus list at all.
“The federal government is about to give a huge amount of money to the very same people who helped get us in this mess in the first place,” Rick Moran wrote recently in American Thinker.
Worse, Moran argued, ACORN stands to profit by the very foreclosure crisis it helped create by using tax dollars to buy up foreclosed homes at rock-bottom prices, which it can then later sell to “more luckless victims.”
Luckless victims are ACORN’s stock in trade. Its “People’s Platform” declares that: “We will continue our fight...until we have shared the wealth,” using federal, state and local tax dollars to wage an all-out assault on American businesses.
Many of ACORN’s radical ideas – such as “sustainable development” and “regional government” – have already been adopted by suburban officials who don’t understand that ACORN’s attempts to limit the growth of suburbs and force middle-class taxpayers to subsidize the inner cities they’ve left behind are all part of its long-term “wealth-sharing” strategy.
ACORN affiliates in 11 states have pocketed some $31 million in federal funding alone since 1998, according to Boehner. The group’s 174 affiliates are a money launderer’s dream come true. A 2008 report by Washington lawyer Elizabeth Kingsley warns about the difficulties of making sure that charitable money is not illegally used for political purposes.
Last year, ACORN hired more than 13,000 part-time workers to register voters in 21 states, including Florida, where Seminole County elections officials held up dozens of registrations submitted by ACORN workers after finding wrong addresses, fraudulent signatures and other suspect information. ACORN officials admitted fraud was committed and fired one employee.
In Nevada, ACORN workers signed up 60,000 new voters in Clark County, but the county’s registrar of voters told the Las Vegas Review-Journal there was rampant fraud in the thousands of new registrations ACORN was turning in each week. Many other states had similar complaints.
ACORN claims that its much-criticized voter registration drives are necessary because many poor and minority residents are disenfranchised by anti-fraud enforcement efforts. But a 2008 study by the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis found otherwise.
Heritage’s David Muhlhausen said declining welfare caseloads from 1996 to 2006 contributed to the drop in voter registrations at public assistance offices, but that there was no indication that former welfare recipients were not registering to vote by mail, at state motor vehicle offices or other locations.
“Of course, people on welfare are not being disenfranchised. They have tremendous opportunities to register to vote. There are a lot of third-party groups, including ACORN, actively engaged in voter registration for the poor. The fact that we have less people on welfare is a good thing,” Muhlhausen told The Examiner.
More on ACORN:
What is ACORN?
ACORN Tactics
ACORN Timeline
ACORN Funding
Division in ACORN's Ranks
Barbara F. Hollingsworth is The Examiner’s local opinion editor. She can be reached by email at: hollingsworth@dcexaminer.com. Examiner intern Samuel Wiles contributed to this report.
